speaking of alternatives, what brand do people hate that actually has a decent alternative?

Derrek@lemmy.ml to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 54 points –

I know people prefer to complain instead of act, but what is something people don't like but has an alternative?

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Dungeon and Dragon. There is a ton of TTRPG out there and things like Level up 5e are direct replacement with better content.

Hell even just D&D 3.5e is better than 5e imo. Though I mostly play Pathfinder 2e nowadays (I'd be happy with Pathfinder 1e as well).

Just 5e is boring as hell to both DM and to play.

undefined> 5e is boring as hell to both DM and to play.

My experience this is 100% the group, the system is secondary to the quality of DM and other players. A good group will have fun in any system.

Out of curiosity, are you using some kinda app? Cause I've been seeing comments, including yours, contain "undefined>" and it doesn't seem to be either a Lemmy or kbin thing. Maybe a misfunctioning app?

Ha I run a game store and it's finnally good to see things like Blades in the Dark, Mork Borg, Alice is Missing, Avatar, Cyberpunk, and Pathfinder knock a percent or two into the D&D Market share.

iPhones. Love my Pixel and I don't care how much my co-workers bitch about bubble colors.

I (American) just attended a strategy meeting and one of the ice breakers was "are you a green or blue bubble?".

I had no idea what it meant, similar to others that are android users. While it was a fun and engaging session, I was kind of shocked that was a thing. I'm obviously not oblivious to Apple vs Android convos and opinions, but I had never been asked that question.

Our group, BTW, was pretty evenly split. 😅

The alternative to that is using Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp. I didn't even know it was a thing until I read American news on Apple being it's regular anti-consumer self.

As an European, I always find it funny how iMessage seems to be so prevalent in the US that the "bubble colors" issue is even a thing. Here, almost everyone uses WhatsApp. Better for communication across different device types, probably worse for privacy. But at least no artificial discrimination because apple hates open standards ¯\(ツ)/¯

apple hates open standards

What about WhatsApp is open?

I think they are maybe referring to Apple's reluctance to integrate with RCS.

Not an unfair complaint against Apple, but ignores Google's/Android's problematic "support" for RCS, and in this context of this comment seems to imply that What'sApp isn't "closed" like iMessage.

Yeah, that's true. Pretty much every messenger has that issue, Signal, Telegram, etc. Ideally there would be an open standard like email, SMS and you could choose your preferred app and have cross messaging and group chats.

RIM made a similar play when they kept BBM closed to their phones and it backfired but Apple seem to have the opposite effect from keeping it all in house.

I'm certainly not trying to be an Apple apologist here, as iMessage has plenty to critique. But it bears consideration that iMessage falling back to SMS is a certain amount of openness, is it not?

Yeah it's weird. I mean I use Google Message (RCS) and it has visual differences for conversations that are using RCS vs ones using SMS but I honestly don't care about the color. I care more about using a modern cross platform standard than falling back to ancient SMS because Apple wants to use a proprietary locked down system at the expense of their user's experience. WhatsApp might not be bad but no one I know really uses it so I would have to start convincing people to switch. That's more than a uphill battle. It's completely futile. The only thing that will change the tide is Apple either opening up iMessage or Apple incorporating RCS into iMessage. I don't see either happening anytime soon because they simply don't care about interoperability.

Went back to android with the first pixel. After five different phones (microphones and speakers kept breaking) I went back to iPhone.

Sounds like you had issues exclusively with hardware, perhaps you should'ce gone for a different manufacturer. My personal anecdote has never seen anything break (that I didn't cause myself).

I mean, it’s google’s flagship phone. My experience with Samsung in their other products has never been good. Which is why I went back to the product that has always worked for me.

All 5 were Pixel's?

Yes - only because they were still under warranty so google kept shipping me more.

This is why I don’t buy Android.

The software isn’t optimized enough from smoothness and battery consumption perspective.

Also, the ROM that’s usually comes from the manufacturer is either spyware, bloated, or just crap. You need technical knowledge and risking bricking your device to install custom ROM.

The hardware, which is my least concern, depends on the company you buy from.

My SONY smart tv (with apps disabled) would phone home like ~200 times a minute.

This is the same thing that happens with Windows and Mac. Your issue was hardware; you could have tried any of the other manufacturers who make Android phones. It's like saying you stick with Mac because you don't like Dell - there are other hardware brands who use the same operating system.

As I mentioned elsewhere - this was google’s FLAGSHIP phone. The other big hardware manufacturer for android is Samsung - I’ve had plenty of their products (including a phone) and have not had good experiences.

As for your other comparison, I actually use Mac because after 7 years my MacBook runs like the day I bought it whereas the 4-year-old Lenovo l have takes about 15 minutes to boot and struggles to open Word.

I think you just got unlucky most people don't have anything close to that experience

Yeah, conversely my kids use iPhones and they, and their iPods back in the day, are more troublesome than my and my wife's Androids (Galaxies, Pixels, One+)

The kids are only on iPhones because they were the smallest form factors for sale at the time. Little kids have little pockets

In the US,I phone is a social status. They're judging you because it's like you don't own a car and just have a unicycle in their minds. What amazing marketing. I'm an Android pixel owner since the beginning and still am. There's some articles written about it too

Yeah Apple people are very clickie. If you don't have one you're a freak. Lol I'm fine being a freak. I never cared much about fitting in anyway. Fuck the Joneses!

It's strange as flagship Androids are just as expensive.

But there are a lot of Androids that aren't expensive, unlike iPhones.

I can see reasons why people would prefer android, e.g. ability to install apps outside of the manufacturer’s App Store, and there are some android models that are cheaper than iPhone (less so since iPhone SE, but still true).

But the post asks about alternatives for companies that people don’t like. I.e., where it’s the company that has a problem morally. Do people generally think that Google is morally better than Apple? Sure, Apple is anticompetitive about hardware and software access because that’s how they make money, but Google is anticompetitive about data and advertising because that’s how they make their money. I kinda think they’re both bad.

Hoping I don’t come off as antagonistic here. I’m genuinely curious what people think.

I didn't see anything in the original post about morals. I answered based on the fact that Apple is a company that some people don't like and Google offers an alternative for some services and products.

If we're talking strictly about morals I would have to think of a different answer.

I feel like google used to be the good guys relative to apple. They were more open and truly supported open source & standards. But I don't feel like there's much difference anymore.

One of their slogans used to be "don't be evil"

Obviously they dropped that a while back.

You can save so much money and add so many customization options by switching to android.

I'm old, and think of my phone as a piece of equipment. In terms of looks, status, and stuff like that, I'm more interested in what protective case to buy.

I'm not sure but the iPhone bubble colour debate seems so US centric. In the UK, I've never heard of anyone bringing it up

It is 100% exclusive to iPhone users in the US and it's so bizarre and ridiculous. Apple has even brainwashed children with this shit to the point that kids are bullied for not having iPhones.

I wouldn't be surprised if teens in Canada felt the same way. Not necessarily the Hubble colour bu indefinitely sense iPhone is a status thing.

Amazon, sort of. It absolutely cannot be beat for convenience. Ordering something in 15 seconds, then having it shipped within 48 hours is unmatchable.

But if you plan ahead, and aren't an impulse buyer, you can find alternatives with better products and similar prices. Most stuff on Amazon is absolute junk with clickfarm reviews.

Ironically Reddit was really good for finding niche websites for whichever product you were looking for. Hopefully Lemmy will reach that point eventually.

It's a shit company with shit morals and shit practices, but I use it... If I have to. And usually that means I've checked locally, I've checked other big retailers, and if everyone fails me I'll reluctantly buy it on Amazon.

Would be interested in a community for general purchase recommendations (any product, no specific category). Having a thread site like this where actual humans who bought the product and don't work for the company can write honest reviews/recommendations is extremely valuable

Not the same but which (which.co.uk) is a non-profit consumer group. You can pay them subscription and they do non biased and quite detailed reviews of all the normal electrial stuff. I've used them for a washing machine, freezer, earbuds, TV, handheld vacuum cleaner.

AliExpress is the alternate for Amazon if you can wait a month to get your crap. All the products are exactly the same except £2 instead of £20.

I wouldn't buy any electronics from AliExpress though.

Every order I've ever made on Ali:

  1. Me: Place order
  2. Ali: it will be there in a month
  3. A few weeks later, Ali: Your order was cancelled.
  4. Back to Amazon

But if someone makes a version of Ali that works in the states, Amazon's online store is already a dinosaur and can easily be dominated.

really?

Ive ordered probobly 100 things from Ali. Takes a while to arrive, but only had a couple items disappear in shipping, and never had them not at least ship.

For those in DE/AT/PL/UK: https://geizhals.eu/

It shows many local online shops, including Amazon. Amazon usually isn't the cheapest IME in Germany.

I agree. Now disclaimer, I am someone who still buys tons from Amazon. There is no one alternative. But you can get much better deals if you watch and wait instead of impulse buy. Best Buy is now my go-to for gadgets.

Ordering something in 15 seconds, then having it shipped within 48 hours is unmatchable

you mean like online shopping in general?

I assume they mean having it arrive within 48 hours, which is not typical of most online shopping.

Google. Use Searxng for search, Firefox/Librewolf for browser, Newpipe for Youtube, Graphene instead of default Android, literally anything for calendar and notes, and FDroid for apps. Don't let Google's services destroy your privacy.

Yup. To add more: Brave for searching because it has it's own crawler. OrganicMaps and OSM for maps. Joplin for notes. AsteroidOS for WearOS. NextCloud for Drive (including some auto-syncing/back-up stuff like mobile contacts). Proton or Tutanota for mail.

❤️ Google -> Brave search. Stock Android -> LineageOS (CalyxOS, DivestOS, GrapheneOS). Chrome😬 -> Mull (LibreWolf). Google notes -> Joplin.

Bings actually pretty good now and less bloated than Google.

I also have been trying to convince people to try Kagi. It is so much better than google results, has no ads, and is very pro-privacy.

Only downside is that you have to pay for it, but honestly it’s worth it to me for how much better it is, and no ads or psychology against me is a big bonus

you have to pay for it

You've already lost 99% of people's interest, including mine. No one wants to play $5 a month for a limited number of searches

Reddit

Oh c'mon... nothing holds a candle to Reddit. What other public forum can harrass, downplay, and degrade its contributors while 90% of them remain ignorant/uncaring of what is happening around them?

alternativeto.net is great for this

Windows -> GNU/Linux

KDE/Gnome -> JWM

TV -> Reading books

Twitter -> Fediverse

Coke/Cola -> Tea/infusion

Amazon -> Local bookshop

Amazon needs a bit more than bookshops to replace it. Need a whole shopping mall

A shopping mall and a dumpster full of worthless crap, but you often can't tell if you're looking at an item from the shopping mall or the dumpster.

Thankfully for things other than books (and maybe also for books), a lot of companies offer two day shipping now. Sometimes there's an order minimum for that but I find that most of the time my purchase exceeds the order minimum anyway.

i'm an absolute cola addict and unfortunately nothing else scratches the same itch for me. i am a fan of iced tea though

It's the fizz. I love iced tea, hot tea, and a variety of other drinks. But I was a huge soda fiend.

I switched to sparkling water and HATED it for like 6 months. Now I'll drink more of it than I was drinking soda.

I still have cola mixed with alcohol, but that's it.

People hate KDE? I'll check out JWM, but KDE is incredible.

Both KDE and Gnome can be seen as pretty bloated. They come pre-packaged with a lot of programs and tools that sit around unused, possibly even having corresponding daemons running for no reason.

For someone who doesn't want to think about their computer, and just want to know it's prepared for anything, they may want that. But if they left windows/mac to have a smaller, simpler OS that isn't wasting CPU cycles or disk space on superfluous stuff, then KDE/Gnome might not suit them.

Edit: that said, I've heard of a lot of alternative DEs/WMs, but I've never heard of JWM. I've heard good things about Budgie, might also check that out.

I always love the Linux communities obsession with bloat.

The definition for it is so fluid its almost useless anymore. "Neovim is bloated!" "systemd is bloated and slow"

(This isn't a jab at you btw. It's a commentary on silly Linuxisms)

Why the KDE hate?

They're using a window manager over a full DE, so it's likely the usual case of preferring minimalism to the very complete desktop environment (which many consider bloated). I'm a window manager person myself, but I've been giving KDE a good honest try for the past couple of weeks. It's definitely very nice if you want the full DE experience.

I went the WM route for a while. At a certain point, it was too much bother getting everything set up Just So. I wanted something that would work and had undergone thorough testing with minimal effort on my part. If I want to tinker with something, I want it to be more interesting than a WM config file.

I'm downvoting you simply for suggesting an alternative to Coca Cola.

Good day.

Coke/Cola -> Tea/infusion

Wut

Nah but seriously, they're not interchangeable. A Coke replacement would be another cola.

Moving to Linux sounds cool and is cool until you realize 2 things, one, you can fuck yourself in ways you didn't know possible.

2, windows is dominant and you will lose access to a fair portion of games immediately upon switching.

Unless you really need to lower background bloat, develop code, or got something vehemently against windows, its not worth the swap for 90%+ of the population, you will go back.

I didn't mind the learning curve, realizing the sheer amount of programs and games that have no development plan for Linux was what made me swap back.

1 more...

Broader than a brand, but I think it fits here...

Everyone hates banks. Credit Unions are better in every possible way.

Might depend on the country though. I grew up where credit unions were really common and just assumed they were the best. I had to switch to something else cause I moved across the country and my credit union was only on western Canada. While shopping around, I realized that the big Canadian banks were offering way more than my credit union ever was. Plus their website actually felt modern.

Well one disadvantage of credit unions is that you might not be able to get a debit card. Loan interest is usually way better though.

Huh? I've used 4 different credit unions, and I never heard of being unable to get a debit card.

TurboTax. I used freetaxusa this year and I'm never going back.

I've used freetaxusa for almost 20 years now. I'm always surprised more people don't know about it (granted, from the name, it does sound like a total scam).

Wish we didn't have to file taxes at all though...we have the technology.

Have a care with some of those.

One year I tried a couple of those free services, and they told me I owed over $5k. Not even exactly the same number. But turbo tax told me I only needed to pay $2k. Guess which one I used?

Not saying it's always that way, but made me a lot more cautious about the smaller tax filing sites. It's worth doing your taxes twice or more before submitting them to see the difference.

Can you clarify - do you mean hate because it's paid for marketing and there's much better products for a similar price,(sort of BIFL maybe?) or hate because the company is anti consumer somehow and there's a better company or free version?

Like for the first, Kitchen Aid stand mixers. Way overblown because marketing and resting on laurals from 50 years ago when they're not built like that anymore. Bosch Universal Plus is a much better spend if you want robustness imho.

For the second the obvious is Microsoft, and a community driven Linux as the alternative.

I could go on I suppose.

Was explaining that to a customer how things that used to be bad ass but now are shit but expensive as hell because they are using the name and the reputation from 50 years ago to sell the shit.

Like Maytag, and Whirlpool used to be the best brands to buy. Now they are crap won't last ten years.

Ten years? You’d be lucky to make it 12 months out of warranty. Our Whirlpool dishwasher was the biggest pos I’ve ever used. Switched to Bosch and can’t be happier. Hard to tell it’s even on.

Frozen veggies over fresh. I'm so fucking sick pf buying veggies then having a ticking clock on them. Frozen gives me all the nutrients and I can leave them in the freezer for months and not lose anything.

For me it's the watties frozen stir fry mix. Cheap and has a good range. I do however pick out the pea pods because they suck.

There was a medditarrian mix that was amazing to cook in the air fryer but after buying 8 bags in a week they took it off special and it went from $4 to $8

Aren't frozen veggies usually fresher as well. Like they are frozen within a couple hours of being harvested?

Pretty much only buy frozen veg now

WhatsApp for me. I hate it but in my country all people use it.

then just don't use it...

"just don't talk to your friends, bro"

because whatsapp is the only way to talk to your friends...

It's not that is the only way to talk to your friends. In some countries Whatsapp is the default way to communicate with other people because of SMS prices so if you need to talk to your friends, distant relatives or complete strangers you know you can reach them using that app.

In some cases the fastest way to communicate with a company's customer service is through Whatsapp.

I've had some success getting people in some social circles in Canada to use Telegram.

Got sick of the SEO spam from Google so I switched to Kagi. It lets me block all the blogspam and Pinterest junk when I search.

1.5 cents per search query. hmmm... not sure if i could switch my mind to be careful about searches.

I guess I would start using local calculator and dictionary more.

With the $10 plan, it's 1 cent per a search for the first thousand, and maybe a thousand searches a month doesn't sound like a whole lot but supposedly the average user on Google does 3 to 4 searches a day (who knows what the actual source for that is). Thought in that case the $5 plan would be better.

Google doesn't seem to provide a dashboard which summarizes how many searches one has done personally over a period of time, though it does list them all on https://myactivity.google.com/product/search if you haven't opted out.

Most browsers also provide an easy way to switch between search engines, though personally I would suggest always using Kagi if you're going to spend the money, because some of the of value comes from generally having better results, in addition to being able to filter out SEO garbage for specific search topics (like programming queries).

Also, to be fair, Kagi is not perfect. Google's calculator and unit converter are better in my experience, for example. And I still use Google at work (software dev) because I refuse to use personal accounts on work devices, but even then I find myself using my phone sometimes to search Kagi when Google is not turning anything up.

However, I've watched Google's search quality drop for a long while now, and I like what Kagi is doing, so I support them.

P.S. If you're worried about unlimited spend, Kagi provides settings to cap pay-as-you-go costs.

Instead of browsing on reddit, there's this new thing called "Lemmy"...

Adobe design products, there's Affinity, it's great, professional and a lot cheaper.

I made the mistake of saying I use Photopea instead of Photoshop on a forum. The adobe mafia slammed me into oblivion for that one 😆

Yeah I should have added that distinction. I’ve yet to see a comparable cordless in the price range. I meant full vacuums.

I shop in Lidl, and it's full of brands that are decent in their own right but design packaging clearly meant to evoke the big name brands. Most of them taste better than the big brands too

People complain about Banks screwing them over with fees and caring more about investor profits all the time. But few people move their money to credit unions or other co-operatively owned financial institutions. Usually it's because of some minor inconvenience.

Interest, cash back, and in person locations are hard to beat for me. I search a couple times a year to see if I can find a credit union that beats or meets what I got currently.

In my suburban town you can't turn around without bumping into a credit union branch. They all work together cooperatively too. The only reason I ever go into a branch is for my safe deposit box.

Nice! Yeah one around here is really good and has remote tellers at thier ATMs which is super cool. They just don't have the same cash back rate as my current bank.

The thing with a CU is it's great until something goes wrong. Although anecdotal, these are all real world trouble I've had with ours: 1) Need to have safe deposit box drilled. Took over 6 months to get it scheduled and repeated visits to the branch manager. 2) Had a double post of a debit. Not a biggie, but no 24 hour customer service (or weekend service unless you come in person). Had it been fraud or a huge double post I would have been out of luck until the next business day. And would likely have had to go in person. 3) Ordering checks required an in person visit. 4) Changing out an old secondary signer for a new one required an appointment that took several weeks to book (apparently no one there works full time). 5) Interest on our money market is worse than the local big banks.